Well, the question sort of implies that you’re needing to implementing Math.max yourself, for whatever reason. Probably as an exercise. It doesn’t make sense to reuse a library that implements the feature if you’re explicitly being asked how you would implement it yourself.
In some ways they can be wholly different, but I don’t think this is a good example of it.
Any programmer who cannot implement “take two numbers, return the larger one” is clearly not very competent. Even though you’re never going to literally need to implement Math.max yourself at work, you are going to need basically the same types of skills. Probably 95% of the work I do day-to-day is stuff you’d learn in your first year at uni, and this just shows that you’ve got that ability.
In practice, the best interviews I’ve had usually set a slightly more complicated task as a do-in-your-own-time problem and then go through what you did in the actual interview. Problems like “read a list of names in the form , each name on a separate line, from a text file. Sort the names by last name, then by other names. Output to another text file. Include unit tests.” They wouldn’t then expect you to re-implement the sorting algorithm itself, but more want to look at the quality of code, extensibility, etc.
More basic questions like the one in the OP, or fizzbuzz, are decent as well, and a big step up from lame questions like “what does SOLID stand for? What does the Liskov substitution principle mean to you?” Even if they’re not quite as valuable as a miniature project.
In practice, the best interviews I’ve had usually set a slightly more complicated task as a do-in-your-own-time problem and then go through what you did in the actual interview.
The best interviews you’ve had are the ones where you’re doing free work on your own time?
“Work” is a debatable term. It’s not work that provides any direct value to the company, if that’s what you mean. But yes, it involves more effort on my part.
But yes. Not only does this method let me show that I’m good at what I do (far better than nonsense theory questions do), I have also found that companies that use this approach tend to come across as a better fit in other ways during the interview process.
I think you can probably make the question a lot more interesting by asking them to implement max without using any branching syntax. I’m not saying that is necessarily a good interview question, but it is certainly more interesting. That might also be where some of the more esoteric answers are coming from.
For me, a good interview is a dialogue where the company representative shows me as much about the company as I do about me as a candidate. Take-home tasks are okay, I guess, but I suspect they might balk at me requesting they handle a mock HR issue, or whatever, for me!
If you’re optimizing that hard you should probably sort the data first anyway, but yeah, sometimes it’s absolutely called for. Not that I’ve actually needed that in my professional career, but then again I’ve never worked close enough to metal for it to actually matter.
That said, all of these are implemented as functions, so they’re already costing the function call anyway…
I was under the impression that modern compilers just inline something like that, and even in older languages (like C) use trickeries are used to inline it (typically MAX is a macro rather than a real function, so its always inlined)
Ultimatelly it depends not just on what you’re doing but also the language and compiler you’re using.
Thankfully the only interaction I have with teams is when a supplier arranges the call. Once every two weeks. It grosses me out every time…and that’s the Web app.
Do you really think they have done such optimisation efforts as minimising function calls? I can’t imagine it’s required for what is actually a fairly simple frontend app. The complexity is the enabling stack on the backend.
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